Home Sharing not working after macOS Tahoe upgrade

ok, been in talks with Apple for several weeks!

Scenario, Updated almost everything to 26, Mac, phones, iPad, ATV 4K, I have a Mac mini that I left on Sequoia which does the serving and the files sit on an external.

Phone ok, iPad ok, ATV all fine, can play imported files fine, but then came the annoyance, my Mac M1 could not play files, purchased was fine. My sons Mac which wasn't updated and running Sequoia was fine playing them too!

So was just my Mac running Tahoe, can see the files in the TV app, but no response when trying to play, tried another user on the same machine, same!! GRRRR

So Apple recommended I do what I was thinking of doing [which I had put off in case Tahoe was dodgy!] and that was update the Mac min server to Tahoe, did that and absolutely no different!

Ive had several calls with senior agents and still no joy, they've had me stripping apps of that may be interfering etc, VPN [profiles too] BitTorrent apps, any apps that may interfere with network stuff...

They've taken capture data and logs to see whats been going on when ive reproduced the sequence of trying to play a file. Nearly a month later and I am still waiting!

Ive seen that someone suggested it could be that the files are on external, but ive tested that and still no good. Today I tried an obvious thing and put a file on my Mac to see if the file plays on the Mac mini server...

Absolutely the same non result, nothing, does exactly the same, no response! So at least I know its not the machine I noticed it on, I cant be unlucky that its something on both machines! it has to be a Tahoe problem for sure!!!

One extra note, I had several playlists, if I access a file via those, the video actually opens a window but thats it, no playhead movement, nothing, can move the playhead but still nothing, just a black window!

I’m experiencing the same exact issue. Home sharing from Mac to iOS/iPadOS/tvOS devices works fine, but playing fails to start on macOS clients. I have two Macs running Tahoe 26.0.1, and playing fails to start in both directions (between the two Macs, both sharing libraries). The video posters are shown (with the new stupid vertical format), and can be imported into the local library. There are no error messages.

Same issue here. Mac Mini 2010 with High Sierra as a Media Server with iTunes with Home Sharing. Clients are a Mac Mini M2 Pro and Macbook Air M1. Both with MacOS Tahoe. The video posters are shown (as Daemon said with the stupid vertical format we all dislike), but can't be played on those two Macs. No problem to play them on an iPhone 13 and an iPad Mini 5, both with Tahoe.

I just upgraded to Tahoe 26.1 to see if it would fix screen sharing through messages, which was broken in Sequoia... I could screen share with older Macs using any os earlier than Sequoia. Anyway, Tahoe did not fix that... but also broke home sharing for me. I record vinyl records on an old 2010 Mac Pro tower running Catalina. Home sharing worked great under Sequoia. On my 14 inch m3 MacBook Pro I could choose the library from the old Mac Pro and it would show up, then I could choose "Items not in my library" from the Show: pull down menu. I would then select the songs and hit the import button and the songs would copy over to my main Music library on the m3 MBP... Now Music unexpectedly quits every time I attempt to access the shared library. I went through all the usual trouble shooting. Logged out of home sharing on both, logged out of iCloud, restarted... logged back into iCloud, logged back in to home sharing... etc. Still quits every time.